The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) invites Smart Grid professionals to a Smart Grid Location Standards Meeting to be held on March 20 from 8:00-10:00 a.m. at the OGC Technical Committee Meeting in Austin, Texas, USA. This meeting is sponsored/hosted by the OGC, in cooperation with the University of Texas at Austin.

The ability to communicate geospatial information is seen as a crosscutting requirement in Smart Grid standards efforts worldwide. The OASIS eMIX (Energy Market Information Exchange) standard uses the OGC Geography Markup Languate (GML) Encoding Standard. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) CIM (Common Information Model) standard is "harmonized" with WXXM (Weather Information Exchange Model), which is an industry profile based on GML. More standards coordination and development, however, is required to enable efficient geospatial communication within smart grids and between smart grids and "neighboring" activities such as emergency response, disaster management, urban planning and building energy management.

Many of the OGC's domains of activity – sensor webs, weather, indoor/outdoor location integration, 3D city models, location services, data fusion and others – have significance for the Smart Grid. Many OGC members have a stake in the Smart Grid information technology market, the growth of which depends on the evolution of a standards infrastructure that includes location standards.

This meeting (an "ad hoc" meeting in the OGC's formal meeting nomenclature) has been set up to assess the level of interest in the community to tackle open geospatial standards for the Smart Grid. It is expected that OGC member participants will agree on near and intermediate term actions, which may include the drafting of a Smart Grid Domain Working Group charter.

The Smart Grid Location Standards Ad Hoc meeting is open to the public and admission is free, but Smart Grid Location Standards Ad Hoc Meeting attendees who don't plan to attend other OGC Technical Committee sessions must register via email at register@opengeospatial.org. See details of the OGC Technical Committee meeting athttp://www.opengeospatial.org/event/1203tc. 

OGC staff and Eric Nelson of Synaptitude Consulting will facilitate the meeting. We hope you will attend

About the OGC

The OGC is an international consortium of more than 440 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website athttp://www.opengeospatial.org/contact.